I was walking through campus today and I saw this poster, not sure what it was for, that said ‘be yourself!’
That got me thinking…how come we need to be told to be ourselves? I look at my kids and I couldn’t possibly see how they could be anything but their little eccentric selves. They are full of self, and I find myself constantly telling people about their awesome personalities and the things that they love doing. Lily loves everything artsy and crafty, as well as maths and science and wants to be like Leonardo DaVinci who covered all of these things. Oliver loves all that is food, eating it, cooking it, watching cooking shows and reading recipe books. He thinks he is already famous (Jamie Oliver has HIS name) and when he grows up he tells me he wants to be a chef…or a Transformer.
I always have these mini psych sessions with myself in my brain – I’m both patient and doctor- and ask myself questions like: Ange, if you could live your life again, what would you do differently? To which I answered: I would have never stopped playing my guitar after my band broke up in high school and I would have completed a fine arts degree. That’s it. That is it. They are the only things I would do differently. Everything else has made me the person that I am today, and I hope that for the most part I am my-self. Music and creating art have always been my passion, and anyone who knows me, knows that if you ask me what I want to be when I grow up I will always answer with: rock star! This is something that has never wavered…yet here I sit as an academic, and don’t get me wrong I love to teach my proverbial ass off…because I love to perform. But if you told me to be myself I would just as quick run to a stage to sing you my version of Mustang Sally and then make you a vintage dress.
I just wonder when in life that sense of self is overpowered by a sense of someone else’s self. When we decide, for whatever reason, that being our self isn’t good enough. I wonder this, because my parents always supported me and told me I could be whatever I wanted to be…so I don’t know why it is that at some point my mind decided that this person that I wanted to be wasn’t good enough. As Mr Weasley says ‘the truth will out!’…and it does and it has…The musician/artist isn’t a life that hasn’t been lead by me, or a path I didn’t take…because it is me. It is just a part of my self that has yet to grace the stage, as it is still rehearsing.
Anyway, this is kind of a self indulgent blog, but I think it is a lot harder to be yourself, until you know what that self is. There is a difference between performing a version of the self and being yourself, and often we perform the version that we think is safe, and not the actual self.
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